Taken in the waning days of Soviet civilization, Bakharev and his subjects were involved in the semi-legal business of private portrait photography. It was this that brought them together on the margins of society, creating an almost erotic sense of trust among the accomplices in this illegal form of micro-communism. As in amateur photography, what is essential about these photographs is that they were originally not meant to be seen by strangers — only their subjects were supposed to see them. The shots were meant to exist as single prints—originals in the literal sense of the word.